God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215

A fresh telling of the earliest encounters between the Islamic world and Christian Europe hardly needs justification. Legacies of these conflicts, David Levering Lewis notes with understatement, are “pressingly with us now.” God’s Crucible is a sweeping overview of the dramatic rise of Islam, the formation of something like Christendom in the West, and the subsequent confrontation of those cultures, especially in and around Spain.